As if the Mullahs Were All Young at Heart

In her compelling new memoir, "Lipstick Jihad," Azadeh Moaveni gives the reader a guided tour through the underground youth culture in Tehran, introducing us to kids who follow an " 'as if' lifestyle," as though their society were not under the thumb of hard-line mullahs, as though it were "permitted to hold hands on the street, blast music at parties, speak your mind, challenge authority, take your drug of choice, grow your hair long, wear too much lipstick."

She takes us to Ally McBeal nights in Tehran, to a "post-revolutionary, posh health club," to a Tehran fashion show and to a "techno-Ashoura" party, held on the anniversary of the holy day when the prophet Muhammad's grandson Hossein was martyred in the seventh century. She writes that "in Tehran, where Western movies were officially banned, everyone had a filmi, a video guy, who schlepped a trunkload of new films around to his clients' homes as a sort of mobile video store," and that many teenagers "worked fiercely to imitate music videos and Hollywood movies to every last detail," assuming, "with a touching naïveté, that all guys should act like Carson Daly."

Ms. Moaveni, who worked as a reporter for Time magazine in Iran before joining The Los Angeles Times to cover the war in Iraq, grew up in California, the daughter of Iranian émigrés. The story she tells in these pages is partly the story of her efforts to grapple with her own identity: as an Iranian growing up in an America unable to forget the Iranian hostage taking of 1979, and later as an American journalist in an Iran that remained, on an official level anyway, militantly anti-American.

It is the story of an American reporter trying to deal - personally as well as professionally - with the myriad restrictions placed upon women in Iranian society, and the story of a young woman trying to come to terms with her family's memories of an Iran now vanished and with her own conflicted sense of loyalty to both countries.

Growing up in California, Ms. Moaveni felt that "the shame of the revolution" placed enormous pressure on her and other second-generation children to fit in, "to be ever more exceptional," to "achieve more, acquire more degrees." When she moves to Iran in 2000, she finds herself becoming outraged over indignities perpetrated by the regime's morality police - indignities accepted by her Iranian friends with cynical resignation. Her friends in Tehran tell her that she smiles too much (a sure sign she is American), and remind her that in Tehran "having a facade is normal, because being honest is such a hassle."

This sense of being an outsider in two worlds may have made daily life difficult for Ms. Moaveni, but it also makes her a wonderfully acute observer, someone keenly attuned not only to the differences between American and Iranian cultures, but also to the ironies and contradictions of life today in Tehran - a city where men and women can ride motorbikes together but must queue in segregated lines at the passport office; a city where the restrictions on male-female relationships (meant to instill a solemn sense of decency) have inflamed people's carnal instincts, making them "preoccupied with sex in the manner of dieters constantly thinking about food."

Ms. Moaveni observes that the harsh dress codes imposed on women have encouraged an obsession with plastic surgery aimed at perfecting the face. She writes that "low-grade depression was a national epidemic" in Iran, and that since contempt for the system has tainted many people's traditional esteem for Islam, more and more people are turning to Eastern spirituality, yoga and homeopathy for relief. And she argues that "the mercenary survival skills young people had been forced to develop prevented them from making lasting attachments" because "love involved the suspension of selfishness, and the anarchic culture of the regime had made selfishness paramount."

Because Ms. Moaveni tends to rely heavily on sources who belong to the educated upper middle class, it's hard for the reader to tell just how representative her impressions might be. But her book lays out a rich, tactile portrait of her and her friends' daily life in Tehran, suggesting that "at some historic moment impossible to pinpoint, around the turn of the millennium, Iranians' threshold for dissimulation and constriction sank, and people simply began acting differently." Women stopped carrying socks in their purses (in fear that they would have to cover their sandal-clad feet) and began wearing lipstick. Cautious, penny-pinching citizens bought illegal satellite dishes. Intellectuals began writing "vicious satire and stinging commentary." And "people of all ages turned up music in their cars, caroused with the opposite sex."

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Those residents of Tehran determined not to be "marooned at home with bad Islamic television," she writes, learned how to navigate the mullahs' rules and maneuver around the police. "A culture of transgression" flourished: women learned they could flout the limits on dress and comportment "in the right neighborhood, at the right time of the day or month, in the right way," just as young couples learned they could circumvent prohibitions "with the right verbal pretexts, at the right times, in the right places."

Ms. Moaveni argues that these grass-roots changes will eventually alter the trajectory of Iran's history, that the younger generation - born just before the revolution or along with it - "is transforming Iran from below": "From the religious student activists to the ecstasy-trippers, from the bloggers to the bed-hopping college students, they will decide Iran's future." She also notes, however, that the optimism initially engendered by the reform movement in the late 1990's has given way more recently to disillusionment, to the realization that with the hard-liners controlling the judiciary, the armed forces and state institutions, there are no easy ways to move a reform agenda forward.

She writes that many activists, subjected to harassment and blackmail from the hard-liners, "simply gave up their political work, in return for promises that they and their families would be left alone," and that "as the life was slowly pummeled out of the reform movement throughout 2000 and well into the spring of 2001," the thinking of many Iranians underwent a shift "from a specific hope vested in recognizable figures, to the distant, abstract conviction that things would change because they must."

In fact, throughout this volume, Ms. Moaveni seems to be in a dialogue with herself about the country's future: at one moment deeply depressed over the realization that "Iranian society was sick," "spiritually and psychologically wrecked"; the next moment angry at Americans eager to depict the country as "exclusively static, declining and repressive" and intent on ignoring the many ways in which social life there was changing. She laments the effect the revolution has had on people's lives and dreams, and yet contends that it had the ironic effect of making "a huge segment of Iranian society more tolerant": "By taking rigid moralism to such a bloated, extreme level, the regime had shown definitively that minding thy neighbor's religiosity was an ugly way to live."

After 9/11, with America at war in Afghanistan, Ms. Moaveni decided to return to the United States. Whereas she had been able up to that point to work "with a relative freedom that surprised" even her, the Iranian government had begun to clamp down, and her sessions with a government minder she calls Mr. X grew increasingly vociferous. In large measure, she suggests, this was because President Bush's depiction of Iran in his 2002 State of the Union address as part of the "axis of evil" had inflamed the government's suspicions and served as "a divine gift to the hard-liners, who were running out of excuses for their ongoing repressiveness."

Near the end of this illuminating book, Ms. Moaveni writes: "The country was under attack, said the hard-liners, and everyone needed to band together. Internal conflict would no longer be tolerated. If the ostensible goal of the Bush administration was to promote tolerance and democracy in the Middle East, thereby discouraging militancy and religious extremism, then its policies had neatly produced the opposite effect."